Is this still a democracy? You be the judge

Lawrence Martin is the author of 10 books, including six national bestsellers. His most recent, Harperland, was nominated for the Shaughnessy Cohen award. His other works include two volumes on Jean Chrétien, two on Canada-U.S. relations and three books on hockey.

Not to be facetious, but isn’t it time to find a new name for our system of government? Aren’t we being rather generous in still calling the operation in Ottawa a democracy? Isn’t it a bit like calling the Maple Leafs a hockey team or Vladimir Putin Aristotelian?

Real democracies, as we learned in high school, are supposed to be open and tolerant of dissent and have checks and balances and run fair elections. Those kinds of things.

But anyone who scrolls through recent media, conservative media included, might be forgiven for concluding that we have something more closely resembling the opposite. Something more akin to billy-club governance. Think of the ironclad controls, the scorning of accountability, the censorship, the smearing of opponents, the power unto one. The abuses are not just opposition talk. They’re writ large in Auditor-Generals’ reports, in internal documents and journalists’ investigations. Some of the abuses have happened in other governments but have they ever happened on the scale we’ve seen from this crowd?

On the democracy depth chart, behold the highlights from just recent weeks, bearing in mind that this is the level of development the process has reached in this, Canada’s 145th year.

This week we got the news that our freedom-loving Tories have been sending out “minders” or chaperons with Canadian scientists to monitor and record their every public utterance and report back to Ottawa. The Harper Conservatives have been called control freaks a thousand times, but this is wild, even for them. This is the type of thing I used to see when, back in the 1980s, I reported from the Soviet Union.

This news came on the heels of Auditor-General’s report suggestive of so much duplicity in the government’s handling of the costing of the F-35 jet fighters. Costing of programs? Wasn’t the prime minister once found in contempt of parliament for refusing to divulge information on costing of programs?

In addition, we’ve also had the revelation of possible vote suppression and electoral fraud by the Conservatives in the 2011 election campaign. We’re into very serious matters here. These types of practises, currently being investigated by Elections Canada and as yet unproven, strike at the heart of what democracy is all about; fair and free elections.

The government now has a majority and it need not worry about being brought down. Nonetheless, it has taken to imposing closure and time limitations on debate at a rate seldom seen. Meanwhile its history of intimidation tactics and misinformation campaigns against opponents has continued apace, a recent example being the attempted takedown of respected lawmaker Irwin Cotler.

On the question of censorship, try the example of Kristi Miller, a leading scientist from our fisheries department. Her research revealed why salmon stocks have been depleted off Canada’s west coast. The top research journal “Science” published her work last year and it was deemed so noteworthy that the publication notified 7,400 journalists worldwide. The government’s response? Rather than support the breakthrough by one of its employees, Miller was muzzled, prevented from speaking to the media or at conferences.

On the question of openness one can only marvel at the ongoing siege mentality. Last week the media disclosed how a team of bureaucrats turned themselves inside out fretting for hours on how to respond to a media inquiry to the National Research Council. What was the subject of the inquiry that had them so convulsed? Patterns of snowfall in southwestern Ontario.

Whether this eye-bulger tops an earlier revelation on the staging of a fake citizenship ceremony is an open question. This one had the ring of something straight out of Pyongyang. The Conservatives couldn’t locate real Canadians who needed their citizenship renewed so they trotted public servants for use as political props – stand-in stooges for the patriot charade.

Indicative of the surreptitious way checks and balances are subverted in the system was another story last week on how the cabinet very quietly handed itself the power to overrule the National Energy Board on projects such as the Northern Gateway. A National Post columnist was so affronted at this new outbreak of “institutional duplicity” that he accused the Tories of treating Canadians “like fools,” while knowing they could get away with it.

In the same context was the Conservatives’ barring of an opposition MP from gaining accreditation to an international climate change summit and then castigating that same MP for not being there. In keeping also were the AG’s findings on Tony Clement’s slushy G-8 summit work. This minister of the Crown spent about $40-million, deceptively sold to parliament under the false guise of border-infrastructure funds, for spruce-up projects in his riding. In an in-your-face gesture, the prime minister, rather than disciplining Clement, gave him the responsibility of spending-cut czar, ferreting out waste in the budgets of others.

Many other examples of the debasement of the democratic process, such as the prime minister’s twice shutting down parliament when the walls were closing in on him, have been described in past reports. But to have the full picture, reminders of some of the Tories’ handiwork from previous years are helpful.

In keeping with their sending out of “minders’ to monitor government officials, we recall that the Conservatives put in place an unprecedented vetting system wherein all communications had to be channeled through central command. Our public service and diplomatic corps have been silenced like never before and there are continual murmurings about the politicization of the Privy Council.

Via a government edict, cabinet staffers, no matter what acts of folly they may have committed, no longer can be compelled to testify before parliamentary committees. As for ministers on the hot seat, such is the degree of accountability in Question Period that they often don’t even bother standing when called upon to answer questions. Others take questions for them. In keeping with the effort to lessen scrutiny, lapdogs have been appointed as watchdogs, there being no better example than that of the former Integrity Commissioner, Christiane Ouimet.

To curb patronage, the Tories initially came up with the good idea of having a Public Appointments Commission. They’ve since scrapped the idea even though, as was not the case in a minority, they would have a free hand in naming the head of the commission.

New ways have been found to impede the workings of the access to information system. Empirical studies and research data have been hidden or suppressed – an example being a report of the Commissioner of Firearms on the gun registry, because they run counter to the governing ideology.

Agencies like the CRTC find their decisions being overruled by the PMO at a rate never seen before. Documents (Bev Oda’s office) or statements (from former A-G Sheila Fraser) have been tampered with or altered so as to reflect better on the government. Inquiries such as one by the Military Police Complaints Commission on the Afghan detainees’ controversy have been discontinued. Punitive measures have been taken against independent agencies, commissions, tribunals and NGOs who show signs of differing with the prevailing ideology. At Veterans’ Affairs, medical files have been leaked in attempts to embarrass those who have challenged the government.

At the level of party affairs, the prime minister runs what former top aide Tom Flanagan describes as a garrison party in which no dissent is brooked and in which democratic challenges to nominations, such as that of Rob Anders in Calgary, are ruthlessly snuffed out.

Of particular note recently are the allegations of electoral fraud. A last line of defence against those who say our system is an affront to true democracy is the idea that we have a fair elections system which allows us to kick the bums out every few years. With the 2011 campaign – the one, we recall, in which a senior Harper operative tried to frame Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff as an Iraq war planner with bogus photos – now even that is under question.

Transgressions were committed by the Conservatives in a previous election. In the 2006 campaign, the one in which the Tories were campaigning on a new era of openness and transparency, they were caught exceeding, with their advertising purchases, spending limits. In closely contested ridings, the added publicity spots might have made a difference.

For the election of 2008, the breach of faith came in the calling of the campaign. The PM had brought in a fixed-date election law, saying that no party should have the advantage of springing a surprise election call on an unprepared opposition. But he ignored his own law and chose to do just that.

To all the evidence of abuse, Harper ministers like Peter van Loan and John Baird react obliviously, saying – we’re not kidding here – that the Tories run one of the most open and transparent governments ever. This was the government which, upon coming to power in 2006, did bring in accountability legislation that had many attractive features. Many of the measures, however, were discarded in name or ignored in spirit.

As noted, abuse of the democratic process is hardly new. The decline of Canadian democracy is a long-running story. On abuse of power, the record of the Chretien government, as myself and other journalists reported at the time, was hardly pretty.

But with the billy-club governance of the Harper era, we are breaking new ground in the subverting of the democratic process. Technically we might still call it a democracy. In practice it’s a democracy in name alone.